Does your website have a lot of machine translated (MT) content? Did you translate a lot of content with Google Translate, the Microsoft Translator or another MT tool? Well if you did, then Google may remove your website from their index entirely. At least that’s what John Mu, a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google wrote on the Webmaster Central Help forum yesterday.
“In general, when we determine that a page contains only auto-generated content, we may remove it from our index. If we determine that the largest part of a site consists of auto-generated content (such as when it’s automatically translated and crawled & indexed like that for several languages), then we may opt to remove the whole site from the index. This may sound a bit harsh, but auto-generated content that is created for search engines is a really bad idea and a waste of our resources.”
When you put a translation widget into your website, the translation is generated on-the-fly and is not cached anywhere. So Google does not index that content. And while putting in a translation widget may improve the website stickiness, it will not get you any search engine traffic or improve your SERP ranking for foreign language keywords. So some website owners translate their content into other languages with a MT tool as a cheap way to get out more content, more internal links and more traffic. Google’s John Mu advises against this practice as you can all plainly see.
I agree with Mr. Mu on at least one issue. Putting out garbage translations will not help your company project a professional image. And it will probably not bring in much international business.
But from a pure SEO standpoint, I am not sure how strongly Google enforces the rule that Mr. Mu points out. As part of the ongoing product development efforts at GTS, we created a few sites with 100% MT-generated content. Not only did Google not ban these sites, it still shows those website pages on its SERPs one year after the test websites were launched. Used judiciously, creating language versions of your content with MT may get you some positive results. What Mr. Mu is saying IMO is “don’t overdo it.” That is probably good practice.
Do you have any experiences with using MT for SEO? Please share it with us.
